Go here now
You have only until March 3 to comment on the government's internet strategy, so go to www.iagchampions.gov.uk/ Strategy.htm as soon as possible. There you can read e-citizen, e-business, e-government, a 32-page white paper prepared by the Central IT Unit on behalf of the e-envoy. CITU has long been the most wired bit of Whitehall - not hard when the competition is as clueless as the home office - and its proposals for e-government deserve consideration. Comments can be emailed to consultation@citu.gov.uk

Then Yell
Nominations have opened in the fifth annual Yell Awards for the best websites, run by British Telecom's online yellow pages. There are 11 different categories including, for the first time, one for the best internet service provider. As well as entering addresses for your favourite sites, you may also add comments to say why you like them. There isn't a category for the worst designed site, so www.theprioryshow.com - which features an exclusive Zo‘ Ball online diary - is safe.

Big bangs
The memory of the Eiffel Tower attempting take-off is going to put other firework displays in the shade until the memory fades. However, the US government used to make bigger bangs, and now it has put the evidence online. For a truly frightening experience, watch the Historical Nuclear Weapons Test Films. You can get videos of vast numbers of explosions either as MPEG downloads or streamed in four levels of RealVideo, according to the speed of your internet connection.

Verse & worse
The internet now has a poet laureate, but it's not e e commerce - the choice of FN Newswire - nor the romantic Elizabeth Barrett Browsing. It is Kyle MacRae, from Glasgow, who entered The Coolest Den in Cyberspace in a competition run by BT Click and the Poetry Society. All the short-listed verses are online: go to www.btclick.com and follow the link. Nonetheless, every programmer knows that the award should have gone to the surpassingly wonderful Verity Stob, who has not got a big bottom. Some of Verity's best poems have been published in her column in Exe magazine.

Wise words
Jewishnet has introduced an Ask The Rabbi section to answer tricky questions such as which way you should face when praying in outer space, and whether you can feed space aliens with milk cooked with meat, or chometz on Passover. Follow the link at www.jewish.co.uk. There are more interesting answers at the oracular Newwings at www.artwells.com/newwings. Think of it as a modern version of the ancient Chinese divination system, the I Ching.

Map quest
Matthew Zook's Page of Domain Name Data doesn't look like much but his site is well worth visiting for his maps, which show the density of internet penetration from the streets of San Francisco to a map of the world. Zook is studying for a PhD in the department of city and regional planning at the university of California at Berkeley, and his site is at http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~zook/domain_names.

For starters
Shell has launched a site for newcomers to e-commerce. If you're aged 16-30 and want to start up your own business, www.shell-livewire.org provides an introduction. You can also get a free business start-up pack in the post. NetObjects, which sells web construction software, has also launched a site at www.GoBizGo.com.

Endings
The death of Charles Schulz, creator of the Peanuts comic strip, is being marked at the official site. There's also a homage to the beautiful and bright Hedy Lamarr, who shocked the world with Hollywood's first nude scene in Ecstasy in 1933, and pioneered the idea of frequency-hopping radio communications to control torpedoes. The site is in German and English at www.hedylamarr.at

Mail cheque
"The cheque's in the post" may be one of the world's great lies. A variant is "the cheques in the email". The PayPal.com service lets registered users send cash to anyone with an e-mail address on the internet. But PayPal is open only to US residents at the moment.